Million Dollar Home Page by Alex Tew – http://milliondollarhomepage.com/, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20132455

I need you to try to do something very hard for me. I need you to read this entire blog post. I don’t think it’s going to be hard because I’m going to use big words or highly technical terms. I don’t think it’s going to be hard because of the subject matter. It’s going to be hard because you’re going to get interrupted. In fact, I’m willing to be you got some notification before you ever finished this paragraph.

I didn’t realize just how scattered my attention was until a close friend pointed it out to me. She mentioned that I was always checking my watch for notifications. I didn’t realize it until someone that wasn’t around me all the time saw it. I stepped back and honestly asked myself why I was getting so many notifications. In the back of my mind I knew I was getting too many because when I go on a run my watch won’t stop buzzing with all the things that I don’t even bother to check. That’s when I realized my attention was beyond scattered. LinkedIn, GroupMe, even Yelp seemed to want me to pay attention to something that was ultimately unimportant.

Distracting for Dollars

If you’ve read a post about focus or watched any number of Youtube people talking about it you know that we are drowning in a sea of information. Everything has to update us all the time about what’s going on and what we should be doing. Half of the websites that I visit daily want to put notifications on my phone or desktop when they publish new stories. My son’s dentist uses a camera scanning app to check his braces alignment weekly. I like the idea but I don’t like that the app wants to remind me of scan times and updates on his status and things. It’s like they want me to check the app constantly.

That, in my mind, is the real problem with all these notifications. It’s not that the app or the service wants to let you know about something. It’s that you must check the app RIGHT NOW to see what’s going on. Don’t believe me? Use your phone to check the temperature. Open it up and navigate to your weather app. I bet you have to wade through notifications and updates and banners that are trying to grab your attention the whole time. They want your eyeballs. They need your attention. And they’re willing to do all kinds of things to make sure they get it.

LinkedIn wants to update you on a thread that you posted in because someone liked someone else’s comment. Facebook’s stupid highlight mention makes sure ALL of your friends get a notification when someone uses it in a comment. Can you seriously believe Mark Zuckerberg created a handle to notify every single one of your friends? Of course he did. Because he never wants you to leave his app. He wants you to engage with posts and look at ads. He needs you to stay there so he makes money from you.

I used to think notifications were any important way for me to stay informed about what was going on around me. Now that I’m older and way more cynical I see them as a way to make sure my attention gets split and focused back on whatever they want me to see. Which would be fine with one or two critical apps. But with ten or twenty? It’s downright impossible.

Resource Contention

The problem with distractions goes beyond just popping up when you least want them to be there. Even if I can ignore what just flashed across my screen it distracted me and interrupted my flow. When I’m really focusing on something I can block out everything around me. And when some email or app wants to make sure that I know there is a special 20% off coupon for an item that I have to use in the next ten minutes as a way to get me to open the app RIGHT NOW I lose my place and have to get back to where I was. If you’ve ever had to read the same sentence two or three times to remember where you were you know exactly what I mean.

We suck at multitasking. No, don’t fight me on this. We really do. We think we are good at it because we can jump back and forth between things but in reality we are way more efficient when we work on things in uninterrupted blocks of time. When I start writing I only feel effective when I sit down and write everything until I’m done. I don’t like stopping and starting. Multitasking means I’m constantly shifting my focus and forgetting what I was doing. That’s hard for neurotypical people. For neurodiverse folks? It’s hellish.

Your attention is a resource. You need to conserve it just like you would with money or water or electricity. When you see it as something that needs to be allocated and schedule and budgeted you start to see why everyone is so hungry for it. I try to keep my attention focused on things that require it. Yes, I do watch videos or read blog posts. But I do it with purpose. And when I do I try to minimize what’s going on around me. I ensure that my resources are being spent properly to accomplish my goals.

If you haven’t done it yet, I highly recommend doing some simple things to reduce the amount of distractions you are getting hit with. I disabled a large number of notifications on my watch. I still get email updates every half hour or so. I also get messaging notifications. But for every app that I dismissed or rolled my eyes about getting notified for something unimportant? I took it away. It lives on my phone where I can check it when I choose to see it. And now my watch only notifies me when it’s important. When my mom texts me or when I need to stand up.

Tom’s Take

You can take these ideas and run with them. Maybe you want to try the Pomodoro Technique or you want to play around with focus states in your mobile device to minimize distraction. You could work with white noise in the background to sharpen your focus on your task at hand. You could even create a distraction-free desktop environment to ensure you only see what you need to be doing. No matter what you do you need to make sure that you are focused on what’s important to you. Not what someone else thinks you should be seeing.